I'll Be Your Mirror
by Victoria to Worthing
Summary: Claire stops running from her grief. Desmond catches her fall.


Disclaimer: I don't own Lost or its characters. The title is a song by the Velvet Underground and Nico.

This fic is set after the Season 3 finale and assumes that the rescue mission somehow failed. I will be Jossed, but I don't care, haha. Please review!

Desmond knew all about wearing yourself out so you didn't have to think. In the hatch he had exercised every day, sweating, working hard for no reason but to keep from going crazy. There was no one to see him. There was no purpose to use up his strength. He did it because it was all he could do.

He knew why Claire was walking the beach every day since Charlie died, since their failed rescue attempt.

She was burning off energy, keeping her feet moving to keep her mind still, rocking Aaron in tireless arms to remind herself that she had a mission to fulfill.

Someday she would have to stop.

He had already decided that when she did, he would be there to catch her.

He knew that Charlie's death had been noble, had been chosen, had been coming for a long time. He knew that it wasn't his fault. But still, he felt responsible. His knowledge hadn't created the situation, but his words had helped Charlie choose to go into the station.

Even apart from that, Charlie had become his closest friend on the island, and what Charlie had cared about was Claire and Aaron. He felt the burden of a friend to help them.

He told himself those were his only burdens, not Claire's blue eyes full of tears and hair that moved with the wind, not her cold, slim body as it walked past his spot on the beach, pacing, restless, perfect.

He knew she had finally fallen when he saw her sitting at the edge of the water, letting it crash over her feet, rising ever closer as the tide came in. It gave the illusion that she was waiting for it, willing it to carry her away, waiting to be overtaken.

He sat down next to her, the way she had sat next to him on the day he saved her life (on the way to saving Charlie's). This time he would be the one to talk and she would hold back, looking at him with his own shadowed eyes.

"How are you doing?" he asked. His voice clumsily broke through the hum of the waves.

"All right, I guess." She didn't meet his gaze.

"You don't have to say that if you don't mean it."

"What makes you think I don't mean it?" She looked up then, her eyebrows drawing down over her opaque eyes. He had seen this before. Claire got angry when she was upset, as a way to hide her hurt, or an excuse to speak her mind in a way that she didn't usually dare. He had seen this pattern for a long time, but he had a feeling that neither Claire nor Charlie had ever understood it.

"The way you looked like you were waiting to become Ophelia." Claire looked askance, and he smiled a little at his own bookish reference. "Waiting to drown."

"I don't think I'd drown. You've already proven you can save me." She paused, and if she had been her old self, she would have smiled then. "I didn't say thank you for giving me Charlie's note. I was kind of…distracted at the time."

"I can imagine. Think nothing of it."

"It's so horrible, I don't really know what most of the things on his list mean. They're things he didn't get to tell me. I know that the point of it was that I was special to him but… I wish I could know more about him when he was apart from me. We slipped so easily into being together that we didn't really talk about what our lives were like. Sometimes I feel like we didn't know anything about each other."

"That's the way it seems to be here. People get to choose what they want to share about themselves. Maybe you would have learned more in time… and told more." Privately, Desmond thought that Charlie had seen his life with Claire as a new life, separate from the past and what he used to be. He had wanted to change.

"You know what's killing me?" Her soft voice sounded choked. "It's not that I miss him. I do, so much. I can't imagine being her without him. But I know I'll get to the point where I'm OK. The thing I hate is that… I feel so guilty."

"Why should you feel guilty?" He spoke almost harshly, shocked that she could find a reason to feel remorseful. She didn't know that Charlie had wanted to die so she could be rescued. (Such a sad reason, now that it had all fallen apart.)

"Because…" She leaned over and suddenly her lips were right next to his ear, telling a secret. He wondered why this wasn't uncomfortable. "Because I loved him…but I couldn't love him the way he wanted me to." For the first time he had seen, her teary eyes overflowed. "I tried, I swear. We were like a family, but we weren't… I couldn't feel quite… I hope he didn't know." She pulled back from him, crying in gasping sobs, but his arm found his way around her shoulders and pulled her back into his circle of protection.

"You made him happy. You made him happier than anything, and he loved you… he _wanted_ to love you. You didn't do anything wrong. You're… perfect." She looked up, surprised, and he hastily corrected himself. "Perfect to him."

"I wish I could feel that way." She laid her face against his neck, not running, not hiding.

"Don't you feel it now?" he whispered, trembling with the carelessness and the forgetting that he needed to let himself speak the words.

"I feel something that's not horrible. It's a start."

"You deserve to feel good again."

"I wish I believed you."

"Then believe me." He whispered into her ear, returning her gesture. "I wish you could see yourself through my eyes."

"What would I see?" A smile was trying to break through her tears.

"Only good things." Her hair was spread across his shoulder, flowing down over his back, and her breath was warm on his neck. These were good things in his mind, added to the list that grew every lonely day. "You break my heart," he whispered, but as soon as the words left his lips, he knew they were too strong, too close, the wrong thing to say. He also knew they were the truth.

"Mine's been broken for years." He was familiar with her bitter laugh, because he had heard it come from his own throat many times. She was a shattered mirror image of him, even as she was an impossible dream, his sweet burden, an almost complete stranger.

He let the tide come in and touch them both with its chilly hands, outlining their bodies in the sand as though they were one shape, or two halves of something, a perfect mirror image of loss. He closed his eyes and laid his cheek against her hair, ignoring the way their two broken hearts mingled, trades pieces, and formed something new and whole.


End file.
